Generated over the past year, Imagined Landscapes features a series of mural-sized paintings and chandeliers, conceived as a single installation, depicting lush tropical scenes executed entirely in black and silver glitter. The exhibition will open with a conversation between Duval Carrié and PAMM Chief Curator Tobias Ostrander on March 13, 2014 at 7pm.

“Edouard Duval-Carrié has produced a very exciting new body of work with his dark “Imaginary Landscapes,” said PAMM Chief Curator Tobias Ostrander. “This suite of sparkling paintings and sculptures dialogue dynamically with the characteristics of the gallery space at PAMM, as well as with the context of tropical Miami as a Caribbean city. This series intriguingly reveals the strong influence of his recent pan-Caribbean research and outlook.”

Edouard Duval-Carrié is known for his innovative adaptions of traditional Haitian iconography, which he engages in order to address contemporary social and political conditions. Contrasting his signature use of strident colors, this new project presents works executed entirely in black and silver glitter. Involving extensive research, Imagined Landscapes presents lush tropical scenes that reference specific 19th century paintings executed in the Caribbean and Florida. These paintings, by artists such as Martin Johnson Heade and Frederic Edwin Church, were commissioned as part of Colonialist interests in promoting economic development of these areas of the world. The artists used pictorial effects, imagination and fictions to present the Caribbean as the “New Eden,” a fertile land of possibility. Duval-Carrié’s works translate these historical images into his own contemporary aesthetic language, in order to address the manner in which the tropics of the Caribbean and Florida continue to be sold as tropical paradises, in ways that often obscure traditional economic and social disparities that continue to be perpetuated in these contexts.

Edouard Duval-Carrié: Imagined Landscapes, organized by PAMM, is part of a season of presentations and programs focusing on Caribbean art, and celebrating Miami’s position as a Caribbean capital. On Friday, April 18, 2014, PAMM will open Caribbean: Crossroads of the World, an unprecedented juxtaposition of historical and contemporary works. The culmination of nearly a decade of collaborative research and scholarship organized by El Museo del Barrio in conjunction with the Queens Museum of Art and The Studio Museum in Harlem, the show was redesigned to reflect Miami’s unique Caribbean community. Duval-Carrié’s Le General Toussaint Enfumé (General Touissant Wreathed in Smoke, or Pretty in Pink), 2003 is part of the Caribbean show, as well. Also opening April 18 is a large-scale work by Simon Starling, Inverted Retrograde Theme, USA (House for a Songbird), a recently-acquired installation that traces the paradoxes of modernist architecture in the Caribbean. A large scale installation by artist Hew Locke, a British artist of Guyanese descent, For Those in Peril on the Sea, hangs in the museum’s front entrance.

About Pérez Art Museum MiamiPérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), formerly Miami Art Museum, opened to the public in December 2013 in downtown Miami’s Museum Park. Pérez Art Museum Miami is focused on collecting and exhibiting modern and contemporary art that represents Miami’s cultural diversity, while providing progressive educational and community programming. Designed by Herzog & de Meuron, the Museum’s new, cutting-edge facility provides room to showcase growing collections, expanded exhibition space to bring more world-class exhibitions to Miami-Dade County and an educational complex. Pérez Art Museum Miami was originally founded as Center for Fine Arts, and was strictly an exhibiting organization with no collection of its own. In 1996, as part of an institution-wide reorganization, the museum was renamed Miami Art Museum and dedicated itself to collecting and exhibiting international art of the 20th and 21st centuries with a special emphasis on art of the Americas. In January 2011 work began on a cutting-edge building with generous spaces to showcase its art holdings and attract more top caliber exhibitions. Pérez Art Museum Miami is located at 1103 Biscayne Blvd., Miami, FL 33132, in between the Arsht Center and the AmericanAirlines Arena. For more information, call 305 375 3000 or visit pamm.org.

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For the opening of his solo exhibition, Imagined Landscapes, Miami-based, Haitian-born artist Edouard Duval-Carrié discusses his new work with PAMM Chief Curator Tobias Ostrander. The dialog will address Duval Carrié’s shift in aesthetic, using an uncharacteristically dark palate, as well as how he translates his references, 19th century paintings depicting Florida and the Caribbean, into his own contemporary visual language. The artist’s response to the role of images of tropical paradise, both historically and today, in obscuring economic and social disparities will emerge from the conversation. Edouard Duval-Carrié: Imagined Landscapes, organized by PAMM, is on view from March 13, 2014 to August 31, 2014.